54 Quotes About Empiricism

There's more to science than facts and figures.

Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.

Empiricism teaches that there is a real world of fixed things on the outside and that ideas of these outside things are stamped on the mind which is at the beginning of life a blank.

I remember the teacher telling us that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, alongside Russia. “The Soviet Union is the largest and most glorious empire that the world has ever seen,” the teacher lectured. “We’re all proud comrades. We’re all like brothers. We’re so lucky to be part of the greatest nation that has ever existed. We love our country and our country loves us like a mother loves her children.

Only assertions that we can verify make sense. A sentence such as “God is here” cannot be verified because we cannot prove God's existence by empirical means. Hence this sentence is senseless.

Empiricism assumes that objects can be understood independendy of observing subjects. Truth is therefore assumed to lie in a world external to the observer whose job is to record and faithfully reflect the attributes of objects. This logical empiricism is a pragmatic version of that scientific method which goes under the name of 'logical positivism', and is founded in a particular and very strict view of language and meaning.

There is atheism for dumb people, and also atheism for smart people. The smart atheists - people well-versed in the philosophies of the likes of Schopenhauer, von Hartmann and Nietzsche - could easily migrate to ontological mathematics. The dumb atheists - blind followers of materialism, empiricism, and scientism - never could. To put it another way, atheism based on versions of idealism is so much smarter than atheism based on versions of materialism.

Philosophically, I am a logical empiricist and materialist, and I am a veteran of over 400 radio and TV interviews and debates. I am a Christ-myth advocate and am pursuing research into how Christianity could have begun without a historical Jesus of Nazareth. I am married with one daughter and three grandchildren.

What sets science and the law apart from religion is that nothing is expected to be taken on faith. We're encouraged to ask whether the evidence actually supports what we're being told - or what we grew up believing - and we're allowed to ask whether we're hearing all the evidence or just some small prejudicial part of it. If our beliefs aren't supported by the evidence, then we're encouraged to alter our beliefs.